Sledgehammer Games was founded on July 21, 2009 by Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey, two EA Redwood Shores veterans whose partnership already carried real weight with action fans. Condrey directed and Schofield executive produced 007: From Russia with Love before the pair went on to create Dead Space, the claustrophobic survival horror game that showed how much tension a third-person shooter could build. Their first pitch to Activision followed that thread: a third-person, action-adventure spin-off of Call of Duty designed to recapture what had made Dead Space work. Instead of simply signing the project, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick offered to bring the studio into Activision itself, and the founders accepted, seeing it as a way to protect the culture they were building while working under the industry's largest publisher. The team spent six to eight months on the spin-off and produced a prototype of about fifteen minutes of play before events elsewhere changed its course. When Infinity Ward split in 2010, its co-founders leaving with several staff and roughly half the team facing about twenty months to finish the next game, Activision asked Sledgehammer to set the prototype aside and co-develop Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The staff approved the move unanimously. Released in November 2011, it became the first co-developed Modern Warfare title, carrying both studios' logos on the packaging, and both teams steered it toward Europe to pay off the story told across the previous four years.
With that proving ground behind it, Sledgehammer took the lead on its own Call of Duty entries. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, released on November 4, 2014, pushed the series into the near future with exoskeleton suits that added boost jumps, quick dodges and a new vertical layer to every firefight. Call of Duty: WWII followed on November 3, 2017, bringing the franchise back to boots-on-the-ground combat, and Call of Duty: Vanguard arrived on November 5, 2021. In between, the studio served as a partner on Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War in 2020 after Activision moved the lead role to Treyarch. Schofield and Condrey left in February 2018; Condrey joined 2K's 31st Union in 2019, and Schofield founded Striking Distance Studios that same year. Sledgehammer meanwhile grew into a multi-project developer, opening a Melbourne, Australia studio by September 2019, passing 200 staff by May 2020, adding a Toronto studio in May 2021, topping 450 employees by August 2021 and opening a Guildford, UK studio in October 2021. Parent Activision became part of Microsoft Gaming in October 2023, the same year Sledgehammer delivered Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, the franchise's twentieth release. A 2024 Microsoft Gaming restructuring closed the Foster City, California headquarters and laid off thirty percent of the studio's employees, and in June 2026 Sledgehammer relocated its headquarters to a new studio in San Francisco, California, where it now operates under studio head Aaron Halon. For players, its catalog traces a team that learned Call of Duty by finishing one of the series' most demanding chapters and then kept reshaping how the franchise moves and feels.
